My Life as an Onion
by Marguerite1
Summary: Mulder muses on the layers of his existence.


**My Life As An Onion**

Classification: Vignette   
Summary: When layers are peeled from a life, what's revealed? 

For Nascent and Jordan, vegetable experts and beta-readers extraordinaire. 

*****   
Sandy's Bar and Grill, 9:15 p.m.   
***** 

It's a simple question. 

"Would you like onions on your hamburger, sir?" 

I don't answer. 

I imagine them in front of me, tiny pieces of what was once a whole onion. They move backwards in my swirling imagination, becoming uncooked, then unchopped, then taking their places in the larger onion that was once their life. 

Onion skin under a microscope looks remarkably like human skin. It has cells just like ours, forming a fine layer that looks tough but is easily bruised or torn. 

I was a whole onion, once. I had my father's love, my mother's undying adoration. Then Samantha came, and I was no longer the center of anyone's life but my own. A layer of my onion was taken from me. I wept. 

Not making the first string of the basketball team in 7th grade took away one sheet of cells, my father's disappointment in my athletic failure another. The tears came, but they had to be hidden away. 

The night Samantha disappeared, it felt as if there were no strata left to be stripped from me any more. But I was wrong, so wrong, for my mother's hysteria peeled more of me away from myself and my father's morose indifference cut away my stem, leaving me a mass of raw membranes. Tiers were gone, and tears replaced them, silent, wracking sobs that I hid under my pillow in the night and haunt me still, still. 

Layers like tissue paper fell away from me as I grew. My father packed and moved out when I was in school one day. My mother found solace inside her own onion, leaving mine to dry and wither all alone. The dessicants? The bitter knowledge that their custody battle was over who "had" to take me rather than who "got" to take me. Empty seats at graduation where my parents should have been. Samantha's birthday, and Christmas, and a string of bright-eyed teenaged girls who all wanted so badly to make me forget the pain that they fell into my arms and tore away what I could not give them. 

I went to the airport alone in a taxi and checked myself in at the international terminal. I did not set foot on American soil until I was a graduate of Oxford. More slices, even more than I could have dreamed possible, were taken away in England. Phoebe snatched a handful just for herself and ate them in front of me, devouring me and giving me double cause to weep. 

When I finally came home, there was no one to greet me. God knows where my father was. My mother sent a driver to pick me up and deposit me at a hotel; she had company and could not be disturbed. 

Now that I know who her "company" probably was, my heart sticks in my throat at the very notion. My skin crawls, the skin that didn't fall away from me. 

Every day I worked in the Violent Crimes division took cells from my onion skin, some more than others. I stood by helplessly as a superior was gunned down and felt myself shrink. At John Barnett's trial I lost more of myself with each word I cried out to the judge, the tears stinging the backs of my eyes but not falling outward, choosing instead to fall into the gaping wounds of my onion soul and sear them. 

Then something happened to give me hope that Samantha would be found, and I was renewed. I got the X-Files. 

I also got Diana Fowley, whose duplicity reduced me to a translucent core. 

Then there was Dana Scully, who would be the first to tell me that my tears are caused when thiopropanal-s-oxide is released from the onion and that putting the onion in the refrigerator before slicing would cut down on the reaction. 

While holding my hand. 

She sits across from me at the diner, looking back and forth from me to the waiter who has grown tired of waiting. The cancer that ravaged her from the outside spent an equal amount of energy rending layers and layers from my being, and I wept for us both. Finding the key to her remission dried my tears at last. Now, sitting here in a truck stop ten miles away from Nowhere, Idaho, she is vibrant, healthy, and beautiful, her devotion the nurturing element that has kept me from peeling my last layer from myself and casting it to the heavens. 

Of course, my onion will never be whole again. But what I have left is in Scully's excellent care. 

Onions are good. They add spice and flavor. They are prized in many cultures; riots are breaking out in India because of an onion shortage. But here we sit, offered this fragrant prize as if it were something insignificant. More fools we. 

I look at Scully. 

"Pile them on." 

The bored young man walks away, and Scully settles down in her half of the booth. "What was that about?" 

"What was what about?" 

She regales me with her most pointed stare, the one that tells me - in no uncertain terms - that I'm on her last nerve. I try humor. 

"I just figured that if we both got onions, maybe you'd kiss me." 

Her mouth turns upward ever so slightly. "Mulder, Mulder, Mulder. You of all people should know the old saying." 

"Which is...?" 

Scully chooses this moment to take a long sip of her coffee, then looks up at me with shimmering eyes and a telltale twitch of amusement on her lips. 

"Trust no onion." 

I groan and collapse backwards against the Naugahyde cushion, my earlier self-pity completely expired. I decide not to cause the demise of any innocent onions. "Excuse me, waiter..." 

BoredBoy returns to me, pencil hovering above the pad. "Sir?" 

"Forget the onions. I want mushrooms." 

He doesn't even bother to look at me. Clearly I am insane and must be humored. "Mushrooms, no onions. Sure." 

He lopes off and I consider the mushrooms for a moment. "Hey, Scully, did you know that mushrooms don't have roots? I used to be like that, you know..." 

***   
END   
*** 

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